Page 67 of The Princess Trap
“We did. He’s trying to mess with your head.” Demi stood, her expression unbearably kind. “Don’t let him.”
“It’s really not that simple.” Ruben ran a hand through his hair, looking around the room with unseeing eyes. “He controls almost everything I do—”
“As long as you retain your position in the royal household, sure.”
He looked up sharply. “I’m not giving it up.”
“Ruben…” She sighed. “You know what Hans and I think. You’ll always be your parents’ son, title or not. He can’t take that away from you.”
Ruben swallowed past the lump in his throat. “You have no idea how many things that man has taken from me. I’m not giving up anything else.”
She said something, but he barely heard the words. He was already leaving.
Waiting around for a man wasn’t really Cherry’s thing. So she told herself that she wasn’t waiting at all; she was eating breakfast, and if Ruben happened to turn up, so be it.
It’s not like she was breathless with anticipation or anything.Aside from the moments when her mind wandered from cinnamon muesli and coffee and the sound of Agathe humming to settle on thoughts of his smile, of the scent of his skin in the morning.Thenshe got kind of breathless.
The sound of rapid footsteps tore Cherry from her mooning and Agathe from her task, which appeared to be bleaching the sink. Cherry was pretty sure the older woman had done that twice yesterday, but to each their own.
Demi appeared in the doorway, her mouth pressed into a thin line, her brow furrowed.
"Demetria?" Agathe frowned. "What is the matter?"
“Ruben isn’t in here?"
Cherry's concern spiked at the worried tone of her voice. “No. I think he’s upstairs. What's going on?"
Demi shook her head, turning to go, but then Agathe said in a voice of iron, "Demetria. Tell me. What is the problem?"
The two women shared a look before Demi said, "Harald has run out of patience. Either he’s brought the ball forward, or he gave us the wrong date on purpose. Whatever the reason, we’ve been summoned." She hurried off down the hall, leaving those words behind her like a bomb.
Cherry frowned. She already knew that Harald was, frankly, a grade-A cunt. But Agathe's usually ruddy face had turned grey at the news of his so-called ‘summons’. The old woman wrung her hands with uncharacteristic worry in her eyes, hunching over at the waist.
"What?" Cherry demanded.
The other woman looked up sharply, injecting brightness into her voice and forcing a smile onto her face with obvious effort. "Nothing. It is just, Ruben hates the palace, and he'll be angry."
"Ruben's never angry."
Agathe gave Cherry a look. A look that said,Don't think you know him. You don't.
Something was going on here. Something Cherry didn't fucking like.
"I know Ruben and his brother don't get on," she said. "And I know they kept him away from you."
Agathe flinched as if she'd been hit. When she looked up, her eyes were dark with anger and... something that looked like shame. “They took him away,” she said heavily, “but I let them.”
Cherry took a moment to adjust to the implications of that statement. “You… you didn’t want any contact?”
“That’s not it. That’s not it at all. It is only…” Agathe trailed off, her face grave. “You know, my family was never wealthy, not before my Freja married Magnus. Ruben’s father. But we were always happy. Children were always loved. Always cared for. And I believed—” her voice caught, but she cleared her throat, shook her head. Pressed on. “I believed that everyone would be that way. Especially royalty.” She let out a little laugh. “My mistake.”
Cherry pushed her breakfast away and leant against the kitchen island, dread pooling in her stomach like liquid concrete.
“I should not have allowed it,” Agathe said, almost to herself. “But I was selfish in my grief, too weak to fight for him." She kept on wringing her hands, the movement jerky. "So a year turned into two and then three, and I thought, what claim do I have on him? He will have forgotten me anyway, by now. If they don't want me around him, perhaps they are right."
There was a pause as Agathe swallowed, shook her head. "If I had used my brain, I might have realised. My Ruben, he represented everything that boy had lost. That boy who became king." All of a sudden, the emotions written across her face disappeared, studied blankness left behind. She slapped her hands against her thighs and drew herself up tall. "Well," she said briskly. "Never mind all that. You will go to the palace, and you will see. You will see for yourself."
Cherry opened her mouth to push, to ask, desperate for information she didn’t deserve—but Agathe snatched up a cloth and firmly turned her back.
